The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that 110,000 Americans die as a result of obesity each year, and that one-third of all cancers are directly related to excess weight. Obesity is also a leading contributor to many health problems, including the development of Type-II diabetes. The CDC reports that nearly thirty-five percent of adults in the United States are obese. Obesity is a growing problem around the world, and physicians are bringing needed attention to the issue and associated risks.
In addition to raising awareness on obesity issues, healthcare providers also encourage people to lose excess weight by improving the nutritional content of their diets, eating less, and increasing their amount of exercise. Unfortunately, however, for a variety of reasons, these more conservative weight-loss approaches are not successful for some people. In such cases, where significant weight loss is needed, but is not being achieved, some people have taken advantage of surgical procedures to limit the amount of food their stomach can hold, thereby forcing them to eat less and lose excess weight.
In the United States, there are roughly 200,000 weight-loss surgeries each year, which the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery reports is only one percent of the eligible population for such surgeries. Surgical candidates have a choice between a variety of surgical procedures, however, the procedures can be grouped into two main categories: gastric bypass surgery and laparoscopic band surgery. In gastric bypass surgery, a patient's stomach is stitched, stapled, or divided to drastically reduce the size of the stomach. A portion of the patient's small intestine is then attached between the newly created small stomach pouch and a portion of the small intestine well after the stomach, thereby bypassing the stomach and a portion of the small intestine. Successful gastric bypass patients are unable to ingest large quantities of food and are also unable to absorb as many nutrients as they could before their surgical procedure. As a result gastric bypass patients report excellent weight loss results.
Unfortunately, gastric bypass surgery is not easily undone. In certain cases, patients do not adjust well to the gastric bypass surgery. The causes for adverse gastric bypass health reactions vary, but a major contributor can include decreased absorption of one or more key nutrients due to the effective shortening of the gastrointestinal tract and/or patient failure to adhere to a strictly modified diet that may have required increased concentrations of certain nutrients. Similar gastric bypass complications can arise if a patient becomes pregnant. In such a situation, even though the patient might be adjusting well to the reduced nutritional intake, the patient's body would likely not be able to keep up with the dramatically increased nutritional needs of a growing unborn baby. In any of these situations, it is often impractical or impossible to surgically reverse the gastric bypass in order to increase the patient's nutritional intake as needed. Thus, decisions to have gastric bypass surgery are not taken lightly.
By comparison, laparoscopic band surgery has provided a less invasive, adjustable option for obese candidates. The procedure involves the placement of an adjustable band around a patient's stomach. The tightness of the stomach band can be adjusted during a visit to a doctor using a control port placed near the patient's skin surface. As the band is tightened, the patient's stomach fills up more quickly when eating, causing patients to eat less. Since the food still passes through an unmodified digestive tract, the full nutritional content of the ingested food can be absorbed. Furthermore, in cases with complications, the laparoscopic band can be loosened or even removed to allow for more nutritional intake.
Unfortunately, despite the many advantages of laparoscopic band surgery, gastric bypass surgery has been shown to produce dramatically more effective weight loss and health benefits within the first year following the surgical procedure when compared to laparoscopic band surgery. For example, a University of California-San Francisco study, comparing gastric bypass patients to laparoscopic band patients, found that the gastric bypass patients lost a higher percentage of excess weight (64% versus 36%) and had an increased resolution in Type-II diabetes (76% versus 50%) after one year. Despite some of the downsides to gastric bypass surgery, such dramatically better weight loss results and health improvements can be appealing to patients suffering from obesity and who are in need of fast improvements to their health.
Therefore, there is a need for improved gastric bypass methods, apparatuses, and systems that can provide adjustment and even reversal benefits which are currently lacking, while still enabling top weight-loss and health benefits.